Amerasians: Where do we belong?

I recently watched Machuca. Set in Chile, the film captures the budding friendship between a well-to-do boy named Gonzalo and a poor, dark-haired boy named Pedro Machuca. The two come together while attending a Catholic school that is trying to integrate the rich and poor during the ’70s.

Things seem to be going well between the boys, until men in uniform descend upon a village where Pedro lives. They begin rounding up the villagers, pointing guns, separating men from women and threatening to shoot. Gonzalo, the well-to-do red-haired boy, rides up on his red bike. Through his eyes, we see the chaos of a village under fire. Soldiers are dragging people out of their homes and throwing them into the back of their trucks. Gonzalo sees the girl he once kissed. She is screaming and fighting with soldiers, telling them to leave her father alone. In the struggle, she is shot dead.

It is this moment that my breath quickens. What will Gonzalo do? Will he drop his bike and run to save the girl? Will he pound his fists in anger? Will he try to stop the madness?

Gonzalo starts to back away. Just then, a soldier comes up from behind and starts yelling at him to move toward the others in the village. “Where do you think you’re going?” the soldier asks.

My mind races. Will the boy be rounded up with the others, or shot like the girl? It reminds me of the harrowing moment in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, when Nazis don’t even know that they are killing the son of one of their own.

“No I don’t live here,” Gonzalo yells. “I have nothing to do with it.”

The soldier calls him a liar, and keeps using his gun to push him toward the others in the village. Finally, the boy yells, “Mirame.”

The soldier stops to look at the boy. First, he looks at the boy’s shoes. They are Adidas. And then he looks at the boy’s face. Freckles. Pale skin. Long red hair. Round face. A heartbeat. The soldier playfully slaps the boy in the back of the head, and tells him to scram.

For me, the scene spoke volumes about how appearance can determine who and what you are, and it spoke directly to my belief that I had become an American. It’s a view I developed as a little girl in Okinawa, told by a school teacher that we should stop speaking Japanese to improve our English.

After leaving Okinawa, I eliminated any trace of my Japanese accent by learning how to sound like the preppy girls at my school in Virginia.

In the ’80s, I straightened my hair so I could look like Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith, from my favorite TV show, Charlie’s Angels. By the ’90s, I had lost all visible and cultural ties to a home that may have never been mine. In 1990, I graduated from USC with a BA in Print Journalism. I got a job as a News woman at the Associated Press in Los Angeles. In ’92, I started working for the San Francisco Chronicle, where I worked as a reporter and editor for 11 years. In 2004, I joined the journalism faculty at SF State. Firmly entrenched in mainstream journalism and mainstream life, I thought I was home.

In 2001, I went back to Japan, a place I hadn’t seen since 1976. I had gone back on a Fulbright, certain that I would finish a memoir on a journey back to my mother’s homeland. I knew what the story would be: Girl journalist returns to Japan to uncover the truth about her mother, who never told her that she had once worked in a brothel for soldiers.

The point of the story, I originally thought, was to tell the world that I had uncovered the “truth” about by mother by using sharp and sensible journalistic skills. But the truth is that my story is not that unusual. I’m not alone. A lot of women, in many places around the world, did and do what they have to do. So the question I have yet to answer is what makes the story worth telling now?

Why have I been driven by the story for more than 20 years? Why haven’t I finished? And yes, I do feel like the guy in Sideways. For now, the answer seems to be connected to my identity. I assumed that I would be viewed as an American when I went back to Japan. I also thought that no one would treat me as a Nisei.

I was ready for dirty glances and blank stares. I was ready for hostile behavior. I was ready for everything and anything, except acceptance. Yet acceptance is what I got. Indeed, a woman who started out as my paid Japanese tutor soon became a mother figure to me, inviting me to her home for dinner and taking me shopping. She also made calls for me, free of charge, finding out where my relatives were, and insisting that they meet me.

When it came time to visit my mother’s hometown in Hokkaido, Yakabe-san accompanied me. By the end of my stay in Japan, I had met my aunt, a good family woman in Hokkaido, who ended giving me one of my grandmother’s kimonos. I also met my uncle, who was blind. Talk about ironic. Anyway, my uncle cried. And I cried. We shared an intimate moment, even though we could not speak the same language. And you guessed it: I never raised the question I had been so determined to ask.

In Okinawa, I did not return to the army base of my childhood. I didn’t even ask to go back. Why? I can’t be sure, because I realize that feelings about the past can shift with time.

Instead of a trip to the base, I visited a school for Amerasians. And here again, my assumptions about what I would learn were wrong.

Behind the walls of the small school, I saw them. Young, cheerful, electric. Children. Sun-drenched arms of bronze and brown. Almond eyes, shaped like mine. Frizzy curls, in pigtails and plaits. Boys looked like my brother, strong, silent and fierce. Girls reminded me of my sweet, gregarious sister. I began to speak to some girls, expecting them to speak in English. How could they not? They looked American.

But no one could understand me. And I could not understand them.

I head to Vietnam next month. I am working on two projects: Agent Orange during my work week and personal identity on my days off. To learn more about Amerasians in Vietnam, I have watched numerous videos and read many stories on the plight of Amerasians in Vietnam. Many people have made it clear to me that life as an Amerasian in Vietnam is very tough.

Brian Hjort has been going to Vietnam from his home in Denmark, trying to help Amerasians find their fathers. So has Clint Haines. Some of the videos on YouTube show how Amerasians in Vietnam and other countries are living in poverty, and at least one is shown begging on the streets.

Life, it is clear, is hard in Vietnam, especially for those who don’t look and sound like everyone else. And most people agree that it’s even worse when you look like the daughter or son of the former enemy, even though it has been 35 years since the fall of Saigon. Indeed, lawmakers and advocates have been trying for decades through various policies, laws and bills to bring Amerasians “home.” Under the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1989, at least 23,000 Amerasians were able to immigrate in to the United States, many of them based solely on their mixed-race appearance.

Just a few years ago, the Amerasian Paternity Recognition Act, HR 4007, was introduced to “amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide citizenship for certain children of United States servicemen born overseas during the Vietnam and Korean Wars.” Many thought it would soon pass.

This bill looks like it will be passed sometime in 2008. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, the two largest groups of Amerasians have been excluded, again. The Filipino Amerasians and Japanese Amerasians (primarily in Okinawa) are two of the oldest and largest groups of Amerasians. There are roughly between 150,000-200,000 Filipino Amerasians left behind in the Philippines. In Okinawa, the number could be around 15,000-20,000 of known Japanese Amerasians (many thousands more are unaccounted for).

I too hope that everyone looking will find a brighter future. There is no way I would have become a journalism professor had I not been in a country that gave me a chance to succeed.

Yet, there are some downsides to the person I have become in the United States. I don’t speak Japanese, and have never been able to learn it fluently. I have never gone back to Japan to re-unite with my uncle or aunt, not since 2001. I have never met my cousins in Japan. And I don’t know what I’d say or do, even if I met them now. Just as the Daughter of Danang has found a new life in America, she also has lost something.

At the very end of the movie, Heidi, whose mother had given her up during Operation Babylift, surrounded herself with the life she had built in the United States, Southern twang and all. Her mother, while lighting incense, cries: “Hiep is gone.”

Later, Heidi, or Hiep, as her biological mother calls her in the movie, reflects on her journey to Danang. “I don’t know them. They are strangers to me. I guess I have closed a door on ’em. But I didn’t lock the door. It’s closed, but it’s not locked.”

And that, in my very long-winded way, leads me to the question now on my mind: Is leaving home the only way to find acceptance?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week visits Hanoi for a regional meeting as well as talks on building relations with Vietnam. US officials see scope for growing ties in defense, including military exchanges.

Perhaps now is the time to repeat the words of Gonzalo, ““Mirame.” But this time, instead of seeking a pass, we might tell the people listening, “This is our home too.” I would like to believe I’m ready to try, but even I am not so sure.

Note: If you have personal stories to share about the Amerasian experience, please e-mail me at ywilson@sfsu.edu. Please include contact information so I can get back to you soon.